Lewis's Humean system has been criticised from many directions. For instance, [1]} offers an influential critique of Humean supervenience, rejecting Humean supervenience because he takes Separability to be contradicted by physical theory and Physical Statism to run contrary to scientific practice. The central naturalistic objection to Humean supervenience is that it appears to violate quantum non-locality as found in the correlations of entangled bipartite quantum systems. The total state of these systems does in general not supervene on the states of their localisable parts. In the literature, this has been interpreted as a sign of a form of holism in quantum physics [2]}, [3]}. In fact, Lewis himself was well aware of the problem, which, however, he dismissed by famously insisting that he is not prepared “to take lessons in ontology from quantum physics” before “it is purified of instrumentalist frivolity... of doublethinking deviant logic... and... of supernatural tales about the power of the observant mind to make things jump” [4]}. Although we concur with Lewis that these are serious points in need of being addressed by any viable interpretation of quantum physics, quantum non-locality remains present in realist and physicalist interpretations properly “purified” as demanded by Lewis. Thus, quantum non-locality does put serious pressure on Humean supervenience.Lewis was much less dismissive of quantum mechanics in later work, cf. [5]}, [6]}. In the latter paper, Lewis expresses confidence that the defence of Humean supervenience “can doubtless be adapted to whatever better supervenience thesis may emerge from better physics” (474). This article challenges his confidence.
